Building a successful online brand with content

How a retailer of adventure luggage attracts high-converting traffic with search-friendly content (and has a lot of fun in the process)

When I met him in June at the Internet Retailer conference in Boston, he’d just spent a week on a 500-mile off-road expedition putting a brand new Land Rover LR3 through its paces in Colorado, courtesy of Land Rover Lifestyle magazine.  By the time you read this, he’ll have just arrived back from a three-week expedition to a remote corner of Namibia.  All this, while running a successful and growing retail brand back home in Montana.  How does he get away with it?  Well, put simply, Jim’s business is Adventure.Like his father before him, Jim Markell was a parachute rigger in the marines.  Day in, day out, paratroopers quite literally put their lives in his hands every time they jumped out of a plane.   Today, he applies the same perfectionist’s appreciation of quality materials and attention to detail to manufacturing and retailing the Red Oxx range of premium adventure luggage.  Needless to say, every piece has an unconditional lifetime guarantee.

Building a content-rich landscape

I was already a fan of his product range thanks to an introduction from a colleague in the US, but now I’m an admirer of his marketing strategy too.  Why? Because Red Oxx uses content not only as the cornerstone of a successful, long-term, sustainable search strategy, but it positions this content at the heart of a wider marketing strategy in a manner that leverages its effectiveness exponentially. More on this “holistic” approach later, but first a summary of the tactic.

Over several years, Red Oxx has been publishing informative articles of around 800 words, framed around particular keyword phrases developed using tools such as Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery.  Importantly, the focus is deliberately on longer keyword phrases of three or four words, thus avoiding the most popular and competitive phrases.  They’ve found that the fourth word in a keyword phrase can add the extra degree of specificity that results in significantly higher click-through and conversion rates.

For example, when the airlines changed the rules for carry-on luggage post 9/11, there was a surge of interest in the subject from travellers worldwide.  It was also a subject of particular interest to Red Oxx, who make a range of bags based around these regulations.  Keywords phrases were researched and informational content was crafted, generating a surge of traffic to the site and a very short payback on the effort employed.  So successful was this particular campaign that it still generates top 10 organic rankings for certain keyword phrases and a steady stream of high-converting traffic more than six years later.

Swimming with sharks as a marketing strategy?

Where the example above was a somewhat opportunistic tactic straight out of the guerilla-marketing handbook, the next example epitomizes a slow burn and sustainable content strategy that has become the mainstay of the Red Oxx approach to generating qualified traffic from search.    It’s based simply on understanding their customers – what sort of people they are, and perhaps more importantly, what sort of people would they like to be.  By tapping into these aspirations with content that allows the merchant to interweave their brand and product, there is an opportunity to create the content-rich landscape that the search engine robots really appreciate.
Take swimming with sharks.  Hammerhead sharks to be specific – on Cocos Island, 300 miles off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.  Yes, it really exists (I spent five eventful days there once, but that’s another story), and it’s one of the world’s top Scuba destinations where you’re guaranteed to see more varieties of shark in greater quantities than you might previously have thought advisable or even possible.

So Jim and his cousin Shawn took a trip there a couple of years ago with a company specializing in live-aboard diving trips.  They came home with some nice pictures, a bit of video, and enough words to create a series of four 800 word articles for the Adventure Journals section of the Red Oxx website.  Of course, no detail is spared when it comes to describing the choice of kit bags to take along for the ride – but the content is nevertheless compelling: detailed, well written, keyword rich, and supported by some visually appealing pictures and video.

The articles were all written in-house, and then optimized for search by an agency at a cost of around £250 each.  The cost of adding the supporting video content was probably less than £1,000.  The articles rank more highly than the website of the dive company that took them there.  Even with the cost of the trip factored in, it paid for itself within a year and, two years on, continues to pull in a steady stream of traffic with those high-ranking four word phrases (try “costa rica cocos sharks” and you’ll no longer be surprised to see a retailer of adventure luggage at number 3 on the first page).  The expectation is that it will continue for many years to send qualified prospects to the Red Oxx website at no additional cost – but this is not the only benefit.

Realising the holistic benefits

As I hinted earlier, the real benefits start to kick-in when your content becomes part of a wider strategy for your website. Dovetail with your email marketing in a way that reinforces your brand and supports your merchandise offering.  Allow your content to intertwine with your product pages and vice versa.  Your overall site search visibility will improve as people link to your content or click through from search results pages.

For Red Oxx, this strategy has delivered consistent and profitable double-digit organic growth.  It does no paid search.   It never sacrifices margin by discounting products in order to generate sales.  It no longer needs to tour the circuit of specialist consumer exhibitions (although they still do, mainly to gather ideas for fresh content).  Customers themselves generate a significant amount of content in the form of product reviews and travel diaries.  Jim even boasts of impatient email subscribers demanding to know when the next bulletin is being broadcast so they can read up on the latest Adventure Journals!

Of course, where merchants selling commodity products may struggle to achieve similar success, Red Oxx is a brand that is made for this strategy.  They make a unique range of products with a great story, and sell them to a booming market niche made up of voraciously inquisitive customers with money to spend. Notwithstanding the caveats, the Red Oxx story provides food for thought for any small online business, not least being this: if your brand is your passion, creating lots of keyword rich content can be not only fun, but perhaps the best long term investment you can make in your website.

Take-away points

• If your brand has a good story – tell it
• Write for the person you customer would like to be
• Research the long keyword phrases that will provide the sweet spot
• Create a content-rich landscape to boost overall site visibility
• Think holistically about your content

Article licensed for publication with Creative Commons “Attribution” terms.

First published in Catalogue & e-Business, September 2009

Tags: Content eCommerce